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Codex Entry discusses The Emotional Journey of Tetris Effect, TheParryGod created a beautiful Dark Souls short film, Maddy Myers on the inexplicable sexiness of Soul Calibur's Ivy Valentine, Jacob Geller on The Architecture of Fumito Ueda, Gaijillionaire looks at the Dreamcast's marketing version of Segata Sanshiro, Matt Leone covers the legacy of PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi, Jason Schreier speaks with Blizzard employees about Diablo and the company's present and future, Giant Bomb moderator Gamer_152 discusses spoilers and the treatment of death in What Remains of Edith Finch, Divinity Original Sin 2 gets a Dark Eye GM campaign, Patrick Klepek's How Players Used Shotguns to Tear Open the Fabric of Reality in Spelunky, Super Bunnyhop looks at the "historical" setting of Soulcalibur, and more.

I feel compelled to root for Warborn, if only because it’s helping reclaim hex-based strategy from the po-faced grognard brigade. Announced earlier this week by tiny studio Raredrop Games, it’s about giant humanoid robots with laser swords and pilots that probably shout their own attack names. Not quite Super Robot Wars (now there’s a series I’d love to see on PC), but I’ll take it. Raredrop aren’t willing to guess at a release date outside of a vague “2019” yet, but there’s a nice announcement trailer with a suitably over-the-top vocal theme below. No karaoke subtitles though.

Earlier this year I wrote an article expressing concern for the way Artifact was potentially monetising itself, using the limited information known about the game at the time and extrapolating some assumed policies from that. The idea of a game that lived and died on the Steam marketplace sounded like a disaster waiting to happen (and still does), eschewing the free-to-play slow drip of resources common to digital card games in favour of an entirely monetised space much more reminiscent of physical card games or Magic the Gathering: Online. With Artifact releasing very soon and all the information about it now in the open, the game has revealed itself to be not only fairly barebones but also straight up greedy, looking more like a fleecing simulator than an actual card game.

The sun-kissed islands in Tropico 6 look gorgeous. You could just dive into the refreshing blue waters, where dolphins leap from the water and seagulls coast above the sea’s surface. The luscious green foliage and sandy white shores are filtered through a sunny, orange haze. Ruling as a dictator in this venerable city builder can be quite stressful, but the lens flare heavy makeover of Tropico 6 is a soothing balm.

I will always be a sucker for a stylish, combo-heavy platform brawler, and Bladed Fury is reminding me pleasantly of Vanillaware’s Muramasa on the Wii and Vita. Set in ancient mythological China, a princess attempts to clear her name against accusations of murder by stabbing a lot of people, apparently. In amongst its lushly drawn human villains there’s demons and skellingtons to be battered, or apparently shot with an ancient Chinese anti-tank cannon. NEXT Studio’s hack n’ slasher is due out next month on December 18th – take a peek at the very swish trailer below.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is undoubtedly one of the best RPGs of the past two years running, but developers Larian still have some plans for it. Today they rolled out The Prison Of Shadows, a new campaign, based on Ulisses Spiele’s popular German pen-and-paper setting The Dark Eye to be played with friends in D:OS2’s tabletop-inspired Game Master mode. This also gave the studio an excuse to get into costume and ham it up in the oddly adorable live-action trailer below. They streamed the campaign debut live on Twitch, and we’ve embedded that below too.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker players can expect the second piece of DLC, Varnhold’s Lot, to arrive in February. It will add a bonus campaign that introduces players to Captain Maegar Varn, who is setting out to establish the nation of Varnhold in Dunsward. This expansion will be priced at $11.99.

Enter The Gungeon developers Dodge Roll have announced via Reddit that their plans to release a paid expansion to their popular bullet hell roguelike have been cut short. Instead, they’re going to re-focus on producing one final update to polish up the game as much as they can before they go all-in on their next game. The devs say that just looking at their latest internal work “shows just how shaky our foundations for Gungeon truly are” – it’s just become impractical to add more to the game, short of completely redesigning it from scratch, as The Binding Of Isaac did.

We speak to Alex Karpazis and François-Xavier Deniele about the upcoming Wind Bastion update and the future of Rainbow Six Pro League. SO, if you're windering how on earth Kaid's shotgun will be balanced, what the new meta will be like, and what territories Pro League will expand into next, you've come to right place.

Enlow picked up programming at the age of 40 by enrolling in a class at a nearby college, according to an extensive Twitter thread on her legacy compiled by researcher Laine Nooney. In a profile published shortly before her death, Enlow recalled that an instructor initially barred her and her then-husband Bob Box from taking the class due to their age, but the pair was eventually allowed to enroll after a show of persistence and a stand-out score on a practice test.

US senator Maggie Hassan has pushed for increased scrutiny on loot boxes in the past, and has today asked the Federal Trade Commission to commit to an investigation and education project. This undertaking would see the FTC work to see what effects loot boxes have on kids, and to inform parents about potential dangers including addiction.

The Smite and Paladins World Championships didn’t get off to an impressive start. Several thousand fans gathered around several adjacent screens occupying the back wall of Dreamhack Atlanta, each blasting out hype reels with near identical scripts. It was cookie-cutter drama played in disconcerting semi-stereo, leaving me uncomfortable in half a dozen different ways.

If you’ve been on Overwatch-related Twitter for the last couple of weeks, there are a couple of things you’ve likely seen: excitement over the new Overwatch League brands, fan art of Ashe... or the Toronto Esports meltdown. Toronto Esports served as the Boston Uprising Academy team, and have been participating in competitive Overwatch since 2016. Their Twitter feed has been the subject of much speculation, starting with a showmatch challenge and ending with the organization leaving Overwatch altogether.

To try to answer these questions, I’ve spoken to 11 current and former Blizzard employees, all of whom spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak to press. They’ve told me about a canceled second expansion for Diablo III, and about Diablo IV, which is indeed in development but was rebooted in 2016. They’ve talked about the series’ popularity in China, which is one of the main reasons for Diablo Immortal’s existence, and about how the specter of the canceled game Titan hangs over many of Blizzard’s decisions.

The Strong Museum opened its Women in Games exhibit today as part of its National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. And to celebrate the untold stories of women in video games, the Strong held a unique gathering of the women who made “herstory” in video games.

Some of the pioneering women in games came to the 200-person opening event and talked about their inspirations in making games. The honored speakers included Megan Gaiser, Bonnie Ross, Jen MacClean, Dona Bailey, Brenda Laurel, Susan Jaekel, Sheri Graner Ray, Victoria Van Voorhis, and Amy Hennig.

I’m an easy mark, I’ll be honest with you. If you’re a games publisher, and want me to throw my money at you hand over fist, the most reliable ways is to a) be Japanese, and port your older titles to PC, because I will slap you upside the face with a wad of cash before you can blink. I have had a tremendously good time in recent years with certain Japanese titles coming to Steam, with the absolute highlight of E3 this year being the announcement of Yakuza 0 and Kiwami for PC. I immediately purchased Yakuza 0. The other day, I got a notification on Steam that Onimusha: Warlords was available for pre-purchase, and I don’t need to tell you what happened then, do I?

Gamers Love Fallout is a schism implied by the original article on Polygon, but it’s also the thing most wrong with that quote and why it drove me so wild to read it in a professional review. It doesn’t read as something written as earnestly invested in critique, It reads like the writer needs Fallout 76 to be good because they’re invested in it. What if there’s no redeeming value? What does that mean for our investment in the brand of Fallout? Can a world exist where Gamers do not love Fallout?

A shift is occurring in the games industry. It's called the Accessibility Revolution. The awareness and application of accessibility in games has grown exponentially. Developers around the world are making long overdue ventures into this hidden field to create an inclusive sanctuary in which everybody is able to play the games they want to play.

It’s true. This huge fish person has been waddling through crowds of people who grin even as they duck under the beast’s massive barbels. Several people are taking photographs. I peer into the gaping mouth of the fish. Two human hands suddenly lurch out, gripping onto the creature’s lips from the inside.

The company was actually on the verge of bankruptcy at that time, and our thinking was, “hey, if we’re going to go bankrupt, let’s do something crazy and go out with a bang!” There was this Taito game out called Frontline, and one of our programmers saw it and said and he thought he could take that format and do something a little more interesting with it. So we made the loop lever joysticks, the cabinet, and poured all our remaining budget into this one last extravagant game. We cribbed aspects of Frontline, and also gathered up and researched all the doujinshi-related materials we could find, and used all that as the base for TANK’s development.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is a proper action-RPG, complete with romance opportunities, conversation trees, branching storylines, and bales of soft material to leap into from improbable heights. While well-written and expansive, much of the story’s appeal can be laid at the feet of its charismatic leads. Greek actors Michael Antonakos and Melissanthi Mahut provide the voices and performance capture for Alexios and Kassandra, bringing the characters to life with unexpected nuance (as previously chronicled by some handsome, overworked soul). As a game developer myself, my only question after sinking dozens of hours into it is: how. How do the protagonists remain distinct, internally cohesive, and roughly equivalent, across thousands of lines of the same script?

Recently, Pope was kind enough to join us on the GDC Twitch channel for a conversation about making Return of the Obra Dinn, where he talked about the harrowing engineering and design problems he had to overcome -- and how working to solve those problems is intensely appealing to him.

From the first day I played Soulcalibur in the early 2000s up to playing Soulcalibur VI in the present day, I have felt every possible feeling about character Ivy Valentine’s tits and ass. Alienated. Angry. Sad. Jealous. Embarrassed. Bored. Horny. Amused. Jaded. Ivy hasn’t changed much throughout the life of the series, but I’ve changed my mind about her many times over the years.

Red Dead Redemption 2 implicates heavily America’s recent past. Set in 1899, its presentation of violence, unrest, and industrial expansion proffers an angered explanation for contemporary crises. If poverty and discrimination are still rife today, the game seems to suggest, then they started, or at least went unchallenged, and through that being unchallenged took deeper route, here—society’s achievements in the 19th century are doomed to become its lamentations in the 21st.

In the best possible way, the Hitman series is ridiculous. Its protagonist, Agent 47, is the single most conspicuous person in any crowd. He’s big and bald and white with a bar code prominently tattooed to the back of his head, and not once does this fact deter him from his preferred method of infiltration: wearing a disguise.

It has been a big couple of weeks for Warframe with its recent Switch release – quite a milestone for Digital Extremes, the developers that were on the verge of closing down when Warframe released in 2013

But, something even more important happened two weeks prior: the release of Fortuna, a curious new update that introduced a faction of indentured workers oppressed by a corporate mogul. Naturally, you get to help the resistance, fight the oppression and live out your anti-capitalist fantasies. How can I say no?

Listening to Spider-Man's soundtrack for the first time, I got the same cozy feeling that you get when listening to a track that you know very well. I often find a lot of superhero music to sound generic, or predictable, but this wasn't the case with Spider-Man. The soundtrack has a familiar-but-fresh feeling that is mirrored almost exactly by the game itself: old characters, old storylines, old web-slinging-poses, but presented in a new and exciting way. I tried to briefly explore how the game's music struck this balance in this video. Hope you enjoy!

Skill trees, upgrade systems, ability trees - call them what you want, they have become an integral part of modern day game design. So let’s look at how these things work, where they fall down, and what we can do to build better skill trees.

“I’m actually hoping to finish it in the next few months, so probably around April, May... and then I will hopefully be able to release it in the summer, around June or July,” said Karl Wimble in a video about his game, Equilinox, on February 19, 2016. The game came out on November 23, 2018, and if that’s not game development in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.

One reason I would encourage people to sometimes spill the beans on where their narratives are going is that only stories with plot points we know in advance can speak to the experience of encountering the inevitable in our own lives. The most unavoidable and perhaps most meaningful of these fatalistic events in our lives is death, and a story which lets any character cheat death or which cuts off before we see them have to face down their mortality can never speak to our experiences with the end of life. This is why, to be a game that stares death unflinchingly in the face, What Remains of Edith Finch must let its protagonist, and by extension, us, know that there's only one place they and the other characters can ultimately end up, and its the grave. What Remains is, for a perfectly good reason, a game which spoils itself.

Last weekend I posted a long-form analysis of the moving narrative game What Remains of Edith Finch. Here are a few thoughts about the game that for various reasons didn’t make it into the full article. Major spoilers follow.